The mark of any decent production of Macbeth is that it should send shivers of fear racing down the spine. Too often, however, the tension becomes dissipated, and the dark poetry of night terrors fails to weave its spell.

On this occasion however, in the first new production in the transformed Royal Shakespeare Theatre, this notoriously unlucky play works all its malign magic.

There were many moments when I found that my palms were clammy and my heart was racing. And when I emerged into the fresh air in the interval and heard the bells of Holy Trinity Church ringing, it felt like a blessed escape from evil. But then it was back to the horrors and the heart of darkness.

Director Michael Boyd’s chief coup here is to make this epic but also intimate new theatre feel as claustrophobic as any studio space, and to revitalise the play’s familiar terrors, so that they seem fresh-minted and newly appalling.

His most striking device is to have the weird sisters played by children, first revealed suspended in the air as if they had been hanged. It is a truly shocking moment that makes the skin crawl. Later these ghostly prophetic infants reappear as Macduff’s innocent children, harrowingly butchered by Macbeth’s thugs in a scene that is almost too harrowing to watch.

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Tom Piper’s design is superbly atmospheric, a half-ruined Church with shattered stained glass windows, defaced images of the saints, and piles of rubble on the floor, putting one in mind of the Protestant destruction of religious iconography during the Reformation.

In this disconcerting world, Jonathan Slinger’s peroxide blond Macbeth, with his leering grin and dead eyes, seems entirely at home. It could be argued that he is too creepy, too scary, from the start, and there is never any doubt about which way his brief battle with his conscience is going to go. And the great scene in which Lady Macbeth (Aislin McGuckin, with a Princess Royal hair-do) screws his courage to the sticking point could do with a stronger charge of eroticism.

But once Slinger gets going with the serial killing he is horribly compelling, as his vaulting ambition gives way first to terror and then to the numbed desolation of a man who realises that he has turned his existence into a meaningless wasteland.

The banquet scene is especially well played, with the ghost of Banquo making a shattering entrance like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, And in touch inspired by Rupert Goold’s great production starring Patrick Stewart we see the action first as the deranged Macbeth experiences it, then through the eyes of his appalled guests as Lady Macbeth desperately attempts to laugh off her husband’s behaviour as if it were some ghastly joke.

There is a strong support from Des McAleer as a saintly Duncan and Aidan Kelly as a powerful Macduff, a great oak of a man almost felled by guilt and grief. But this production will be best remembered for Slinger’s charismatic and terrifying Macbeth and for the web of palpable evil that Boyd’s production so remorselessly weaves.